Argues for using the metaphor of the contract as a principal strategy for teaching students how to craft introductions. (SR)

Presents a conception of writing assignments as a navigation through five writing "events" that students experience through individually imposed writing tasks. Describes the five events within each assignment. Concludes with positive student evaluations. (HB)

Offers suggestions on ways to introduce a workshop audience (of faculty, teaching assistants, or new composition instructors) to composing as women. Discusses classroom structure, teaching the composing process, the rhetorical situation, designing writing assignments, teaching expository form, using peer review groups, responding to drafts,…

Presents a title-writing exercise which can be completed in class in 20 to 30 minutes. Asserts that the exercise works for many writers as a strategy for focusing and developing. (PRA)

Suggests writing instructors reconsider the way they represent to students the nature and function of thesis statements, particularly in their first-year rhetorics. Notes that the conventions of disputation and argument are increasingly challenged by the growing value various disciplines are placing on uncertainty, mediation, and exploration in…

Relates the real-life experiences that prompted the author, the 1992 Newbery medalist, to write the novel "Shiloh." (PRA)

Traces an encounter with Mikhail Bakhtin during the process of reading and writing a dissertation. Refocuses attention from "Bakhtin" as authoritative text to the reader. Reappropriates Bakhtin in service of a feminist practice of reading. (SR)

Offers seven planning and prewriting tips for the writing of award-winning proposals. (SR)

Introduces articles in this issue, which examine the ways in which teachers and students have come to use reflection as part of the learning process. Reflection, as a category in Kolb's experiential learning cycle, is the tenth core practice in the Foxfire approach to experiential learning. Reflection is "...some conscious, thoughtful time to…

Offers a poet's reflections on writing and his schooling. (PRA)

Discusses how to make better indexes for online documentation. (SR)

Offers examples of what can happen when writers try to be impressive, and instead are vapid, grandiloquent, opaque, or absurd. (SR)

Makes suggestions for editing technical proposals. Discusses the marketeers, the hierarchy of hype, how to save days, managing story boards, expediting a laborious process, teaching engineers to write, writing incrementally, the art group, and the editing task. Argues that the best proposals come from starting to write early. (SR)

Shares a Bakhtinian reading of a student paper to illustrate how to help students uncover discourses and their points of intersection and weigh the claims of each as they work toward developing a consciously critical point of view on what they read through what they write. (MG)

Offers comments from seven published "Reading Teacher" authors who have school affiliations on their experiences writing for professional publications. Encourages colleagues around the world to take the risk to likewise engage in this process. (MG)